The Dark Half - Stephen King [17]
He could have been in charge of all this and remained plain old Steve Holt until his dying day. But Castle Rock also had three graveyards, and his crew was also in charge of these. Planting the customers was the least of the work involved in cemetery maintenance. There was planting, raking, and re-sodding. There was litter patrol. You had to get rid of the old flowers and faded flags after the holidays — Memorial Day left the biggest pile of crap to clear up, but July Fourth, Mother's Day, and Father's Day were also busy. You also had to clean off the occasional disrespectful comments kids scrawled on tombs and grave-markers.
All that didn't matter to the town, of course. It was the planting of the customers which earned fellows like Holt their nickname. His mother had christened him Steven, but Digger Holt he was, Digger Holt he had been since he took the job in 1964, and Digger Holt he would be until his dying day, even if he took another job in the meanwhile — which, at the age of sixty-one, he was hardly likely to do.
At seven in the morning on the Wednesday which was the first of June, a fine bright presummer day, Digger pulled his truck up to Homeland Cemetery and got out to open the iron gates. There was a lock on them, but it was used only twice a year — on graduation night at the high school and Halloween. Once the gates were open, he drove slowly up the central lane.
This morning was strictly reconnaissance. There was a clipboard beside him on which he would note the areas of the cemetery which needed work between now and Father's Day. After finishing with Homeland, he would go on to Grace Cemetery across town, and then out to the Stackpole boneyard at the intersection of Stackpole Road and Town Road #3. This afternoon he and his crew would start whatever work needed to be done. It shouldn't be too bad; the heavy work had been done in late April, which Digger thought of as spring cleaning time.
During those two weeks he and Dave Phillips and Deke Bradford, who was the head of the town Public Works Department, had put in ten-hour days, as they did each spring, clearing blocked culverts, re-sodding places where the spring runoff had torn the old groundcover away, righting tombstones and monuments which had been toppled by ground-heaves. In spring there were a thousand chores, great and small, and Digger would go home barely able to keep his eyes open long enough to cook himself a little dinner and have a can of beer before tumbling into bed. Spring cleaning always ended on the same day: the one on which he felt that his constant backache was going to drive him completely out of his mind.
June spruce-up wasn't anywhere near as bad, but it was important. Come late June the summer people would start arriving in their accustomed droves, and with them would come old residents (and their children) who had moved away to warmer or more profitable parts of the country but who still held property in town. These were the people Digger regarded as the real ass-aches, the ones who would raise the roof if one blade was off the old waterwheel down at the sawmill or if Uncle Reginald's gravestone had tumbled over on its inscription.
Well, winter's coming, he thought. It was what he used to comfort himself with in all seasons, including this one, when winter seemed as distant as a dream.
Homeland was the biggest and prettiest of the town boneyards. Its central lane was almost as wide as a regular road, and it was crossed by four narrower lanes, little more than wheel—tracks with neatly mown grass growing up between them. Digger drove up the central avenue through Homeland, crossed the first and second intersections, reached the third . . . and slammed on the brakes.
'Oh piss in the shithouse!' he exclaimed, turning off the pick-up's engine and getting out. He walked down the lane toward a ragged hole in the grass some fifty feet